1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a radio receiver, in particular to a direct conversion receiver with zero intermediate frequency.
2. Brief Description of Related Art
In recent years, the direct conversion radio receiver has gained a great deal of interest. In such a receiver, the incoming signal is mixed with a local oscillator of the same frequency, and the beat frequency intermediate frequency (IF) signal has zero frequency (i.e. a DC signal). There is no image to reject and there is no need for a front-end image reject filter. Nor is there any need for an external filter such as a surface acoustic wave (SAW) filter for the IF signal.
However, there are several drawbacks to direct conversion. Among these problems is sensitivity to DC offsets (both internal as well as externally induced) and 1/f noise: With zero IF, the DC offsets and 1/f noise represent error components within the same band as the desired signal.
Many attempts have been made to overcome these problems. [1, 2]. Most of these solutions use some negative feedback schemes, which are complicated, sensitive to instability, and may not solve both the DC offset and 1/f problem together.